The Arcades Project

`To great writers,` Walter Benjamin once wrote, `finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.` Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--`the theater,` as Benjamin called it, `of all my struggles and all my ideas.` Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as `Fashion,` `Boredom,` `Dream City,` `Photography,` `Catacombs,` `Advertising,` `Prostitution,` `Baudelaire,` and `Theory of Progress.` His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin`s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed `true history` that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by `progress,` Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.